For the past few days, following Wednesday’s price-gouging scandal, Uber’s spin machine has been on overdrive. First came this doozy of a piece by Nicholas Carlson on Business Insider in which he praised Uber’s “act of generosity” before railing against my own “obnoxious punditry.”

An equally snow-jobby piece on the Huffington Post soon followed and, just to make sure everyone was clear that the 50 dollar cab company was a latter day four-wheeled Mother Theresa, Richard Levick, a specialist on corporate damage control, trotted out a thousand words or so for Fast Company, again claiming “Uber’s Good Deed Doesn’t Go Unpunished.”

“One blogger epitomized the “rush to judgment” nature of today’s digital media environment–penning the headline “As NY floods, ‘Robin Hood’ Uber robs from the rich and… Nope, that’s about it.” To its credit, Uber responded well to the misinformed criticism. It reinstated its normal prices for one day, and took a $100,000 hit in the process.”

The key phrase there is “for one day.” By last night, Uber’s surge price was back in effect, although the company generously dropped its own cut of the profits (which, handily, protects them from liability under New York’s anti-gouging laws)

The narrative, being furiously spun by Uber and gullibly reblogged by hacks like Carlson (whose motivations we can only guess at) is that by doubling their prices in the aftermath of Sandy, Uber was able to get more drivers on the road to help New Yorkers get around their flooded city.

It’s a heartwarming story of supply and demand, leading prominent Randian dipshits like MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson to tweet, without a scintilla of irony that…

(AirbnB, by the way, did handle Sandy flawlessly. Proactively axing their fees in order not to profit from the thousands of people left homeless by the hurricane. It’s no coincidence that, unlike Uber, the company has also chosen to drop its blanket hatred of regulators and instead work to get inconvenient hotel laws changed rather than simply ignoring them. But that’s a post for another time.)

So, yes, Uber’s “our price increase put more cars on the road” narrative is a highly plausible one. But there’s just one problem with it. And it’s a problem that deserves capital letters, bolding, and possibly a bigger font…

IT ISN’T TRUE.

According to Uber’s statement, republished in its entirety by Carlson on Business Insider, “With limited public transportation, demand for Uber rides is astronomically high. That means we’re working to get as many drivers out as possible to help New Yorkers get around the city.”

But there is not a single shred of evidence that drivers were choosing to stay home on a day when hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were crying out for private transportation. On the contrary, there were numerous reports of drivers picking up passengers for free between paid jobs to make sure everyone could get a ride, even if they couldn’t afford it. But staying at home? When was the last time you heard of a driver leaving cash on the table on a day when tips flow like… well.. water?

And there’s the rub. Uber’s fare doubling had nothing at all to do with getting drivers on the road — and everything to do with getting those drivers on to Uber. Drivers who knew they could probably get far bigger tips by taking private jobs (Uber’s tip to drivers is fixed at 20 percent) needed to be convinced to sign on to Uber. Otherwise all those fares were going straight to the drivers and Uber wasn’t getting a dime!

Oh, come off it, Paul. That’s just a conspiracy theory. There’s no way that Uber would implement a pricing structure that did nothing except to make it more expensive for New Yorkers to get cars that were already on the road. That would be grotesque. That would be vile. Good luck proving…

Wait? What’s that, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar…?

Wow. Pro-tip, Uber: Next time you launch a campaign to snow gullible bloggers, make sure your investors get a copy of the memo too.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]